Why not respond to Jewish leftists demanding action for a US withdrawal from Iraq instead?

Almost six months after putting Judaism’s largest denomination on record calling for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, a divided Reform movement has let languish the resolution it passed with great fanfare at its November biennial convention.

the first — and still only — official stand by a major Jewish organization against the war, even as polls consistently show Jews more strongly opposed to the war than the country as a whole.

But since writing President George W. Bush in December repeating the resolution’s main points, Reform leaders have not issued any press statements on the issue. The numerous action alerts sent to Reform congregations nationwide have called for action on issues ranging from the crisis in Darfur to the bloody budget battle on Capitol Hill — but not a word on Iraq.

Meanwhile, Vice President Dick Cheney “delivered the Bush administration’s strongest rebuke of Russia to date. He said the Russian government ‘unfairly and improperly restricted’ people’s rights and suggested that it sought to undermine its neighbors and to use the country’s vast resources of oil and gas as ‘tools of intimidation or blackmail'” (“Strong Rebuke for the Kremlin From Cheney,”New York Times 4 May 2006), presenting no evidence whatsoever. Of course, his motive has nothing to do with human rights and everything to do with Moscow’s refusal to agree to the US demand for sanctions or military strikes on Iran.

Monthly Review Essays

Historically, capitalism develops institutions and ideologies that justify surplus extraction and capital accumulation. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the financialization of capitalism initiated a new era of accumulation which is known in academic contexts as finance-capital-driven neoliberalism.

Both Sweezy and Dimitrov agree that fascism arises in the middle class and becomes a threat when the bourgeoisie embraces it, but Sweezy’s unique contribution is to demonstrate fascism’s relationship to the postwar transitional period of class equilibrium.